Facebook photos swiped for new dating Web site

Hacking and art mixed on Friday in a freshly launched dating Web site that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.

Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug and “climber.”

The creators of the online “dating agency” were identified at the Web site as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.

“Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules,” the Web site authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.

The artists explained that a million “stolen” Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.

“Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves in toxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions,” the artists said.

“So we established a new Web site (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data,” they said.

Facebook frowned on lovely-faces, saying that “scraping” or mining information violates the terms of service at the world’s leading online social network. Facebook was investigating and vowed to take “appropriate” action.

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